


Already Dead

by Shinybug



Series: The Panic Room [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood, Dark, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:01:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shinybug/pseuds/Shinybug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man could only eat so much death before it ate him instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Already Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Part One of The Panic Room series. Set vaguely during Year Five. As always, for Alexia, who is both my inspiration and my beta. See end notes for warnings clarification.

*~*~*~*

It was a dark and stormy night, and Hermione Granger, being Muggle-born, knew the dramatic irony of a dark and stormy night in a way that few other of her fellow Hogwarts students could. It was the kind of night that made your bones nervous, made your skin beg to stay under the bedclothes, the kind of night that pressed hard against the windowpanes in a way that had little to do with the wind or rain.

And out in that night, visible in the far distance over the trees and through the lashing rain, was His mark, a gaseous thread of green gently riding the underbelly of the storm like a ghostly galleon. Death had been eaten tonight.

Given the nature of things, Hermione found sleep elusive, and as much as her bedclothes were still begging her to stay beneath them, she found the covers to be binding and left her dormitory at three a.m. in her dressing gown and slippers. Thoughts of Umbridge and Filch weren’t even enough to keep her in bed. After recognizing that the real danger was floating ephemerally in the night sky, the threat of points taken from her house for breaking curfew seemed almost amusing.

Hogwarts was quiet inside its vast and vaulted halls; even the portraits were hushed and hiding. Hermione walked the hallways slowly and without aim, passing from shadow through meager beams of light thrown from the enchanted torches on the battlements outside, unaffected by inclement weather. Her home seemed troubled, its walls uneasy, and Hermione found little comfort in them as she usually did when plagued with sleeplessness. There would be no rest for her tonight.

Between rumbles of thunder she thought she heard a noise, a soft arrhythmic tread of footsteps up ahead. Thinking of Filch, she clung to a shadow, but the noise continued to move away from her and there was something troubling in the gait, something slow and halting.

Against her better judgment, and cursing the last five years of sleuthing with Ron and Harry under her breath, Hermione followed the sound.

Several darkened corridors later she had caught up with the mystery noise, which was revealed in a flash of lightning to be Professor Snape. Hermione felt immediate relief at the sight of him, followed by a vague bemusement that Snape would ever be connected with such a benign feeling as relief.

On closer inspection though, she did not feel so much relief. His robes looked worse for wear and were the source of the intermittent water trail she’d been following on the floor tiles. His whole body looked broken, hunched over like an old man’s, his gait stiff and slow. Now and again he staggered.

Hermione thought it a miracle he hadn’t noticed he was being followed; usually Professor Snape knew when he was being _thought_ about. She wondered if she should awaken another teacher or at the very least Madam Pomfrey, but curiosity held her back. If Snape needed help, surely he would have sought it already.

So instead she followed him, down into the bowels of the castle, past the familiar loathsome dungeon where Potions class was held, past what Hermione guessed to be Snape’s own quarters, to an empty wall with one plain door that Hermione had not previously noticed. He stood before the door for a moment, swaying, then it opened and he slipped inside. The door closed behind him.

Hermione crept up to the door, thinking that baiting a werewolf would be a safer venture than spying on Snape, and doing it anyway. She leaned her ear to the worn wood of the door, feeling the dull iron nail of a hinge press into her cheek, and listened. For a brief minute there was silence, broken only by a muffled slithering as of cloth swept across stone, and Hermione wondered what on earth Snape was doing in there.

She was about to leave, thinking the night’s excitement over and feeling a bit foolish, when she heard a soft curse breaking on an anguished sob. The hair on the back of her neck stood up as a shiver ran down her spine. Surely Professor Snape hadn’t made that noise. The Snape she knew would never…

There was just that one sob though, and then the sudden reverberation of magic against stone, and she leapt away from the door in fright. Then like any cat, curiosity got the better of her and Hermione huddled against the door again. Like fireworks, blast after blast of energy ricocheted off the walls of the room. She could feel them against her cheek, against her fingertips resting on the antiquated knob, though she could barely hear a sound.

The blasts seemed random, without measured interval or consistent direction. Little trickles of green leaked from under the door toward her feet and from the tiny keyhole, and when Hermione touched a green tendril with a tentative finger she felt despair and exhaustion and hatred and fear. Something in the pit of her stomach flipped over.

The blasting went on for several minutes, in which Hermione listened for any further sound from Snape but could not hear anything, and couldn’t bring herself to leave until she did. A voice in the back of her mind, the little snippy one who often chided her for not spending every free moment in the library, waxed ironic to her about how Snape wasn’t worth her time or trouble.

Admitting to that snippy voice that it was right, still Hermione waited, unaccountably anxious. Finally the blasting died down to an intermittent tangible flare, and then there were no more ethereal green vines snaking under the door to twine around her ankles. She listened again, heart in her throat, and there was in the sudden stillness a rasping echo of labored breath, harsh and painful on Hermione’s ears.

Biting her lip, she pulled her wand from her robe and tried an _alohomora._ Nothing happened, and she frowned, confused. She tried again with no success, and then tried a more complex spell to make the door itself transparent so that she could see inside the room. When that too failed she had to admit she was stumped, and assumed Snape had enchanted the door from the inside.

On a whim she simply tried the knob, and felt extremely foolish when it turned in her hand. An unlocked, unspelled door in Hogwarts; how novel. She peeked inside the room, expecting to get her head blasted off, and was surprised when nothing happened. Indeed, it was so dark inside that she couldn’t see anything, but could still hear the uneven breathing of the Potions professor somewhere in front of her.

“Professor Snape?” she whispered tentatively, her hands clammy with fear. She really ought to go back to bed, she told herself. This was madness.

“Go away, whoever you are,” replied a voice that was so shredded with pain as to be unrecognizable to anyone who hadn’t been hanging on its scathing tones for several years.

“It’s Hermione…Hermione Granger,” she replied softly into the darkness, and was daunted slightly when she heard a cough of angry amusement, then a quiet, “of course it is.”

“Professor, are you all right? I heard…that is, can I summon someone for you?”

“Wretched girl…you can leave…me in peace.”

She cleared her throat to remove the lump of fear. “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t think you were in peace before I got here.”

There was no reply but the harsh breathing, which seemed most unlike Snape not to rise to the occasion to trample her feelings. Hermione held her wand before her with a trembling hand and said “ _Lumos,_ ” but like the failure with the doorknob nothing happened but a faint fizzle of magic out the end of her wand. It was enough, before the room fell to black again, for her to glimpse a heap of limbs and black fabric on the floor a few yards away, and something dark and shiny staining the stones.

“Bloody hell,” she whispered in horror, shaking her wand as though it were a dying Muggle flashlight. “Why won’t my wand work? Professor Snape?”

There was a grunt, and then something slurred that sounded like ‘panic room.’ Hermione whirled around, tucking her wand away and rushing back into the hallway to grab a torch from the nearest sconce. When she returned with the light she wished she hadn’t, for five years of hating the very entrails of the man hadn’t prepared her for the sight of him broken and bleeding on the floor, or the rush of compassion she felt then.

A cursory glance around the room showed her an eerie emptiness; not a single piece of furniture or decoration marred the simplicity of four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, excepting only the door and the two of them. Hermione leaned her torch against the nearest wall and knelt beside Snape, who lay curled on his side, his face cast into pitiless relief by the firelight. His wand was discarded, forgotten, several feet away.

“Where are you hurt?” she asked quickly, hesitating to touch him but then reaching out anyway when he didn’t reply. Under his torn robes, which were sodden with what seemed to be rain and blood, there was an odd tensile resistance in lean muscles Hermione never guessed he had as she tried to turn him on his back.

He seemed to be attempting to push her away, frowning and muttering things like ‘insufferable’ and ‘unacceptable’ and ‘contemptible” which Hermione largely ignored, given his state. His robes were half off, hanging from his shoulders over an iron-gray tunic whose open collar revealed a pendant of a writhing snake, which Hermione recoiled from and then resolutely pushed aside with a flick of her wrist. There was blood on his chest and arms, but she couldn’t find the source of it.

Snape pressed her hands away from him with weary anger, and she sensed it took all his energy to do so. “There’s blood,” she said stupidly, exasperated and scared, and he jerked his head once, his eyes meeting hers for the first time, perhaps in their entire long acquaintance, as he rasped, “It’s not mine.”

She flinched away from the bleak hatred she saw there and he coughed out a short laugh, which rattled in his chest. Hermione Granger could recognize a dying man when she saw one, wounds or no. She could smell mortality in the room with them, feel it pressing close, and wondered how long this protracted murder would take. A man could only eat so much death before it ate him instead, she supposed.

Feeling suddenly old, Hermione got to her feet unsteadily, intending to walk away and leave this Death Eater to his own devises. She was brushing off her dressing gown with bloodstained hands when she felt long-boned fingers close lightly around her bare ankle. Like the green tendrils of magic, they held her there, and she felt again the despair, the anguish.

Briefly, she thought of her Muggle parents, of their blissful ignorance, their simple life. She wished, for a moment, that she’d never heard the word ‘magic.’

Then she reached down and pried the fingers from her ankle one by one. They were surprisingly strong for his being so weak, but she supposed desperation could enable a man to do just about anything. She walked from the room to the rhythm of his shuddering breath which turned to almost inaudible sobbing.

Professor Snape’s private quarters required an expectedly complicated unlocking charm to enter, but Hermione had always been good with doors. Once inside she spared little glance for his furnishings, though if she were honest with herself she’d always had a keen curiosity about the lair of the Potions Master. She found a silver basin by his bedside and conjured up some water to fill it as well as some clean cloth, her wand working just fine now.

With a deep breath in her lungs to sustain her, she marched back into the bare stone room, kicking the door closed behind her. The sound echoed off the walls and Snape jerked into a protective fetal ball that spoke volumes and turned Hermione’s stomach. She knelt beside him again, placing the basin on the floor.

After a moment Snape relaxed a bit and looked up at her in bewilderment that might have been comical in other, much different, circumstances. There was wetness on his face, though Hermione doubted it could be rainwater.

“We won’t speak of this, after,” she said resolutely, and he met her eyes and nodded, though she couldn’t have said whether she was trying to protect herself or him, or even if it mattered. Still he put up a resistance when she pulled him into a sitting position and removed his ruined robes. His hands were shaking, she saw as she pushed them into his lap. He couldn’t seem to let her do this without a fight, and she couldn’t seem to walk away and let him win.

She dipped the clean cloth into the water and squeezed out the excess, then by torchlight set to wash away the night’s blood. There were fine lines of tension around his mouth and eyes, more prominent when she wiped the wet cloth across his jaw as one would for a child who’d muddied himself playing. Hermione wondered, tilting her head a little to examine his face, how old he actually was. Though his lifestyle had aged him considerably, there was something in his eyes that reminded her of Harry, some dull glimmer yet of hope amid despair, which surprised her as much as anything else she'd encountered tonight.

Hermione wrung out the cloth in the basin, which had turned to a murky reddish brown, trying not to think about whose blood was now all over the both of them, and naturally failing. Her stomach hurt, and wildly she wondered why she was helping him at all, what on earth she thought to accomplish. She took his hand in hers and winced when she felt the stickiness still there.

"Yes, it's Muggle blood," he confirmed in a low tone, and Hermione wondered if he'd been peeking into her mind or if he'd just guessed her obvious question. "Mudblood, if you really want to know."

"I didn't," she replied as tartly as she could with a leaden tongue, washing blood from his tapered fingers, which were shaking like leaves.

Snape was watching her closely from beneath hooded eyes. His hair fell in long black hanks like shadows across his face. His hand twitched within hers. "A young woman, a witch. Muggle-born, like you. So pretty on her knees. Shall I tell you what we made her do before we killed her?"

"Stop it." Tears burned unshed in the back of her throat.

"One day soon I might see you at one of Malfoy's soirees. I wonder, will you scream for mercy like she did or moan like a--"

"So help me, Professor Snape, if you don't shut it I'll shove this bloody rag in your mouth and leave you here to rot." Her voice was calm but inside she was a riot of anguish as she continued wringing out the cloth and washing away the blood.

"I wish you would. Stupid, stupid girl."

Hermione paused in her ministrations to look up at him. "No you don't. Because you don't have anyone else."

"I could do this myself," he replied acidly, and there was a quaver of defiant pride in his voice that reminded her uncomfortably of Ron.

She appraised his shivering form, his exhausted eyes, and knew he was all talk. "No. You couldn't."

After a moment Snape's head drooped down, his hair falling over his face to obscure his expression. "I hate you," he said succinctly from beneath his hair, but it lacked venom.

Hermione felt again that curious rush of compassion mixed with disgust. She might have been reading too much into things, but she thought he might hate himself even more than he hated her. "Shall I get a Restorative Potion for you?"

"Won't work in here."

"You said it was a panic room?" she inquired, distracting him as she rolled up the sleeve of his tunic to get at the stains there.

He grunted. "I enchanted it to diffuse any magic performed within its walls."

"Why?" She hesitated before moving to his other forearm, knowing what she would see there.

"Because," he growled with thinly veiled impatience, "sometimes when I return from a meeting where my chief role was either murdering a Muggle or licking Lucius Malfoy's pristine arsehole in front of an audience of my peers, I find the need to release some steam. In here I can't hurt anyone else, or myself."

Hermione wasn't certain whether he'd been serious about the stuff with Malfoy, but she decided that given the rumors it could very well be true, and either way it was not an image her brain wanted to process. Instead she washed blood from his Dark Mark, which was yet another image she couldn't process.

"Have I disgusted you, Miss Granger?" He sounded hopeful.

"Honestly, Professor," she replied crisply, her fingernails digging involuntarily into his tattoo, "I couldn't possibly think any less of you, so I can't imagine why you're trying to bait me. When I am certain that you can make it into your rooms unaided without leaving a blood trail for your students to find tomorrow, I will leave you to it, and we can both forget this ever happened."

Snape's head had jerked up during her speech and he looked vaguely stunned. She let go of his arm and saw a series of little half-moon marks her nails had made, superimposed over the rust-colored streaks and the black lines of the tattoo. He rubbed the mark lightly, as though she had hurt him.

"What, no scathing setdown?" Hermione glared at him, waiting for a defensive attack.

His mouth moved slightly, lips pursing as though to form words, but nothing came out. Far from feeling triumphant, Hermione felt sick. She bit back an absurd urge to apologize, and briskly looked him over, feeling the need to escape the room as soon as possible. The cold damp was rising up from the stones and chilling her legs, making her extremely uncomfortable.

"I could drag you into the hallway," she suggested softly.

His look was so venomous that she knew there would be no dragging in Professor Snape's future.

"This is ridiculous, I'm getting nowhere. You're covered in blood. This needs to be disposed of," she declared, plucking at the collar of his tunic and then peeling it up over his head. Snape, for his part, still appeared stunned, and mutely allowed her to do it, his black eyes following her with an inscrutable expression.

"Stay here," she commanded, then realized how ridiculous that statement was. She marched out of the panic room with the dirty basin in one arm and his filthy tunic and robes in the other, and once in his quarters she threw the clothes on the floor and spat, " _Evanesco._ " The clothes disappeared.

Hermione leaned against the nearest wall, shaking. She entertained the thought of simply returning to her dormitory, then dismissed the idea as cowardice. After a long and restorative minute she straightened and located Snape's looming wardrobe beside his bed. Unsurprisingly all the robes were black, so she grabbed the nearest one and shut the doors. She applied a cleansing spell to the basin and once again the water was clear.

Upon returning to the panic room she saw that Snape had collapsed again, lying flat on the stones like a dead man. "I knew you were all talk," she muttered, kneeling beside him and tucking the clean robes under his head.

He made no reply but opened his eyes when she began to wash away the stains from his throat and chest. She didn't particularly like the way he was looking at her, but hesitated to comment. There was such sorrow in his gaze, such immense regret, that she wondered if he knew how much he was revealing to her. He was certain not to be comfortable with it.

"What did you do, bathe in her blood?" Hermione whispered, then quickly said, "Never mind," before he could reply. It just didn't seem to want to wash off of his skin, and she wondered if it was always like this when he came back from the Death Eaters. The coppery scent in her nostrils made her stomach churn.

"Yes," Snape said presently, and Hermione didn't inquire as to what question, asked or unasked, he was replying.

"Why do you do this?" she asked suddenly, her cloth sweeping over his ribs as his muscles contracted. Snape really wasn't as old as she'd always thought him, she realized, startled. His attitude was so acidic, his manner so crabbed, that it was easy to think of him as an old man. She wondered briefly, looking at the lean musculature of his torso and the aquiline profile of his face, what sort of man he would have become had there been no magic.

"I don't remember anymore," he answered candidly, his voice drowsy, and again Hermione wasn't sure they were having the same conversation.

She touched his forearm, the one without the mark, with her bare fingers tentatively, and he startled visibly. For the first time since meeting him, she saw Severus Snape not as a greasy git with the manners of a rabid bat, but as a human, as a man. His skin was cool, and Hermione remembered that death was still in the room with them, waiting patiently.

"Sit up," she prodded gently, but had to half-pull him into the position. His arms hung limp like a rag doll as she washed his shoulders, her gaze catching on the shadows of his prominent bones. When she reached to sweep the cloth further down between his shoulder blades he slumped forward, resting his weight on her.

Momentarily petrified, she dropped the cloth and clutched at him, thinking he had passed out. "Professor? Are you--" She shook him and his head lolled against her shoulder. "Severus?"

She wasn't certain why she'd used his given name, but it roused him enough to take in a ragged breath and exhale against her neck. His hands came up to touch her waist and Hermione's stomach flipped over. But he didn't do more than that, and Hermione sat stiffly in his weak embrace, afraid to move, thinking of the dead witch whose blood they both wore in the name of the greater good.

After a minute she raised her hand and touched his head, feeling awkward and a little sick. His hair was not, as had always been thought, greasy, but fine and tangled, damp from the rain. A shudder ran through Snape and his hands tightened on her waist, making fists in her dressing gown. Hermione's stomach twisted with nausea, but she had the sinking knowledge that the feeling emanated from the same place as desire.

"You're too clean."

Hermione's throat made an involuntary strangling noise.

"You remind me of her," Snape said quietly into her hair, and he didn't sound anything like the Potions Professor she knew.

"Who, the witch you murdered?" Hermione whispered.

He shook his head once, then a few more times for emphasis, but didn't elaborate.

"This is going to kill you one day, you know that?"

Snape nodded. "I can only hope that day is soon."

Hermione winced, thinking he sounded so dead already, but remembering the reason she'd come in here in the first place, the anguished use of diffused magic to vent his pain and fear in the one place he couldn't cause more damage.

"Do you know the worst part about being a double agent?" he asked, his breath warm on her skin, but his voice cold.

Hermione shook her head, trying to disentangle her fingers from the soft snarls of his hair, her mind racing down all sorts of dark alleyways she'd never even glanced down before.

"Forgetting whose agent you truly are."

With firm hands that belied her quavering resolve, Hermione pushed him upright and removed his hands from her gown. He watched her with a complicated gaze that she avoided by reaching for his clean robes and drawing them over his shoulders. "If you had truly forgotten, you wouldn't be able to say that."

Snape shook his head wearily, and Hermione was surprised to see the ghost of a sad smile at the edge of his normally sneering mouth. "How little you know, Miss Know-It-All."

She blushed, closing his robes and getting to her feet. "Can you walk?"

"Given time."

Hermione nodded. "I'll leave you then." Her brisk steps took her to the door, where she paused at his voice.

"Don't look to receive any special treatment, Miss Granger. This doesn't change anything."

She looked back over her shoulder at him, sitting there so hunched on the dark stones, robes falling open again. "I never thought it would, Professor Snape," she said, her throat aching. "Good evening."

He nodded briefly, drawing the edges of his robes together and looking as though he might just lie down again on the soiled floor.

Halfway through the open door she paused again, her gaze fixed on her hand where it clutched the doorframe. "Professor. If you were to find me one day at a soiree of Malfoy's..."

"I'd kill you." His voice was implacable and leaden as stone.

Hermione had expected as much, and did not flinch. "Yes, but...would you know why?"

Snape's silence followed her all the way back to Gryffindor Tower.

~end~

**Author's Note:**

> Themes include allusions to violence and underage UST with an adult, but nothing explicit.


End file.
